I’m getting close to another breaking point. I now have upwards of 40,000 RAW files in my Aperture library, which is close to 400GB in disk usage for my library, which lives on a 750 GB SATA drive. Each time I go to update the Aperture Vault that is associated with the library, it takes longer and longer to run. Part of that is due to the fact that I’m backing up to a network mounted sparseimage, and it has to trawl through tens of thousands of files and hundreds of GB of data. Sadly, the 750 GB drive is filling up, though, as I keep my iTunes library and a full set of my home folder backups on that drive as well. Something’s gotta give.

The best solution that keeps my current workflow intact is to get a pair of 1TB or 1.5 TB SATA drives and put them in the two unused drive bays of my MacPro. I would use one of them for the Aperture library, and the other for the Aperture Vault. This unchains me from using the aforementioned spareseimage, as well as freeing up a 750 GB SATA drive to move into one of my ZFS file servers. However, the purchase of two drives right now is unlikely at best.

All of the other options I have involve not storing all of the images in Aperture. This would be especially true for the rapid-fire sequence shots, when I manage to get a gig of pictures of Qais eating avocado during a single meal. With some careful filtering, I could probably move %70 of my Aperture library to individual files on my networked file servers, which have room to spare at this point. The trouble then is access. How do I easily browse the images? Find all images taken in 2008 that I tagged as ‘Oman’? This setup would require a that I setup a networked media server application on the file server to sort, search and deliver the images. It would have to be able to manage NEF files from a D60, a D70, a D90 and a D200 (the four cameras %99 of the raw files are from). Ideally, it would be web-based, so anyone at all could at least look at the images. And of course, it needs to be free – not necessarily ‘free as in freedom’, but ‘free as in beer’. If I could afford the hundreds of dollars media management programs cost, I could just as easily get the hard drives in the ideal solution above.

I have yet to find a free one. (If I had found one, would I have written this long a post about it? I think not.) Really, what I want jinzora, but for photos, not music and videos. Coppermine looks nice and everything, but I loaded it up last night and it won’t eat my NEF’s – and it’s dog slow to import 500KB JPG’s. I wonder how many weeks it would take to ingest my photo library exported at 16 bit TIFFs?

So, suggestions? If I find something, I’ll post about it. If you find something, and tell me about it, I’ll post about that too, and say really nice things about you.